MC39 Project Notes (Spring 1999)

Consider the following two related questions:

What should you discuss at your initial team meeting?

How will you be graded for the project portion of the course?

The relationship between these topics is this: I will grade you in
accordance with the goals you establish for yourselves. It is up to
you to decide what the deliverables of your team are. If you decide
that all there is going to be is a working program at the end of the
semester, then that is what you will be graded on -- all or nothing.
If, on the other hand, you establish a timetable in which there are
other deliverables scheduled along the way -- such as a requirements
document, one or more design documents, an interface mock-up, a web
page of information for users, a suite of test cases, etc. -- then you
will be graded on each of them, and you will have less of an "all the
eggs in one basket" problem. But it is really up to you. Similarly,
my default mode of grading will be to give the same grade to all
members of the team. However, if you establish specific assignments
of responsibility, then I will grade each team member on those items
he or she is responsible for (as well as including a common grade
portion for those items not assigned). Each portion of the project
for which an individual is assigned responsibility needs some
mechanism for separate assessment. For example, if someone has
responsibility for programming a module, then that person must show
test results for that module in isolation in order to show that it
works, rather than just combining it with all the other modules and
leaving it to me to figure out which ones work and which don't.

These matters of establishing goals should be a primary topic for your
initial meeting -- defining deliverables, scheduling a timetable for
the various milestones, and assigning responsibility. I will expect
to have email within the first week telling me how I am to grade your
team.

The other big topic to discuss is your team organization. Are you
going to designate people to play specific organizational roles (like
keeping meetings on task, recording decisions, and monitoring schedule
compliance) or are you going to rotate these roles around from week to
week on some basis? Or are you going to work on an unstructured basis
purely as equals? Are you going to meet at specific times? I will
expect to meet once a week during our class time with your team (I'll
let each team know which day), but you might want to schedule other
meetings as well.

I have one final piece of advice, good both for this project and for
the real world: communicate, communicate, communicate. Your boss will
be furious if the first she or he hears that you are having problems
is when the deadline rolls around and there is no deliverable. Keep
me posted all along the way. That way I'll be able to get you the
help you need, and at minimum won't have a nasty surprise waiting for
me at the end.